Terror Reigns In Iran Torture Common, Say Khomeini Foes

December 8, 1985|By Terry Atlas, Chicago Tribune

NEW YORK — Mojgan Homayounfar, a young high school math teacher who fled her native Iran only months ago, came to the United Nations last week to tell her tale of terror in the streets and prisons of Ayatollah Khomeini`s Iran.

On an autumn day four years ago, Homayounfar was seized and beaten unconscious by several Revolutionary Guards, Khomeini`s most-zealous followers. Briefly regaining consciousness, Homayounfar saw the young men laughing and tossing something into the air.

``It came to me as a shock -- it was my leg they were playing with,`` she recalled calmly.

After being beaten, having her left leg cut off at the knee with a machete and then being run over by the guards` car and left for dead, Homayounfar was found and taken to a hospital, only to be carried out on a stretcher and thrown into Tehran`s Evin prison, which is notorious for its cruelty since the days of the shah.

The terror of that day, said Homayounfar, 24, was only a taste of the horrors she would see in Iranian prisons. For three years, without medical attention, she said she suffered through her own torture and witnessed the torture and death of hundreds, even thousands, who like herself were thought to be political opponents of Khomeini`s theocratic regime.

``I felt that any day I was going to die,`` she said.

There is no way to verify Homayounfar`s story, but ample evidence exists that Iran routinely ignores even the most fundamental human rights of its citizens with a brutality unimaginable to outsiders.

Since Khomeini`s rise to power more than six years ago, there has been growing evidence that cruel and shocking human rights abuses are taking place on an enormous scale in Iran: Thousands -- perhaps tens of thousands -- of executions, lengthy detention without trial or with only ``sham trials,`` routine torture and systematic persecution of a religious minority, the Bahais.

Because Iran has largely cut itself off from the outside world, no foreigners know the full extent of the rights abuses there. However, a special United Nations human rights investigator, denied permission to visit the country, concluded in his report last month that charges of executions, torture, prolonged detention without trial and religous persecution ``cannot be dismissed as groundless.``

Amnesty International said it is clear that torture in Iranian prisons is ``widespread and, in some places, systematic`` and that thousands of political prisoners have been executed since the 1979 revolution, in some cases after summary trials with no right of appeal.

The United States, as it has several times in the past, last week expressed alarm at the ``severe repression`` of the Bahais, who number about 300,000 in Iran.

The State Department said the reported execution of a 50-year-old man from the city of Tabriz three weeks ago brings to 198 the number of Bahais killed since 1979. Another 767 are being held in prison because of their religious beliefs, it added.

``Iran has essentially criminalized a religious faith,`` a department official said.

The U.N. passed its first resolution expressing concern over alleged human rights violations in Iran during a Friday night session that lasted until early Saturday.

The General Assembly`s social committee, noting a report by a special investigator, passed a resolution expressing ``deep concern`` at alleged abuses of human rights in Iran, including summary executions and torture.